In March 2002 around the time Surrey teenager Milly Dowler went missing, the body of a 14-year-old girl was found in a disused cement works in Northfleet, a bleak Thames Estuary town opposite Tilbury docks. The badly decomposed body had been wrapped in tarpaulin by her murderer and left in this desolate corner of industrial Kent, where they had good reason to believe it would never be found.

On 27 March, four days after Sally and Robert Dowler had made an emotional TV appeal for the return of their daughter, the body was identified as that of Hannah Williams, a schoolgirl from Dartford in southeast London, who had gone missing almost a year earlier. On 21 April 2001 she had told her mother she was going shopping in Dartford, where she was well known to market traders as a girl who loved fashion, but didn't have a lot of money. That Saturday, like many others before, she had been intending to go window shopping.

Despite the state of the body, it was easy to identify her. She loved to dress up for her shopping trips and was wearing a black sleeveless top with a pattern of gold leaves across the front with a denim jacket, burgundy trousers and leather boots. Her long fair hair was swept back with a gold scrunchy and she had a fine gold chain around her neck and two gold ear studs. At first there was press speculation that it was another teenager, 15-year-old Danielle Jones, who had gone missing in June 2001 from Grays in Essex just across the estuary from where the body was found.

But as soon as the Kent police described the clothes the girl in the quarry was wearing, police working on the case in London knew it had to be Hannah.

By the time Hannah was identified, Milly Dowler had been on the front pages for a week. There could not have been more of a contrast between the publicity given to the two cases. It is unlikely you have ever heard of Hannah Williams: the discovery of her body merited only a few lines in the 'news in brief' columns of the newspapers. There were appeals in the local paper, but for a long time it was thought that Hannah had simply run away and would probably come back. Somehow, the national media just never got hooked on the case.

There are all sorts of reasons for this, many of them wrapped up in issues about class - Hannah just wasn't the right sort of missing girl to grab the public's attention. Her mum was a single parent and Hannah had gone missing before. Police in London are already overwhelmed with missing runaways from broken homes. The search for Hannah wasn't helped either by a positive sighting by a friend, who said that Hannah was still alive long after she had probably been killed.

In recent years, missing persons have become a commodity to be weighed up and assessed for their media potential and police officers have begun to talk about them as such. One spokeswoman from the southeast London police area who dealt with the Hannah Williams case told me that her mother 'wasn't really press- conference material' and that the girl's background made it difficult to build a campaign around her. While Milly Dowler was becoming a national figure, singing at her now iconic ironing board, smiling out from the bosom of her model suburban family, Hannah Williams was forgotten.

The attitude of police in London towards the case has already caused friction with officers in Kent who investigated the murder. One insider from Kent police said: 'There are serious questions to be raised about the original missing persons investigation. This is very sensitive, but if Hannah Williams had been a Milly Dowler, she may not be dead now.'

Hannah Williams wasn't the only one to be forgotten. There has been no national media campaign about Daniel Nolan, a 14-year-old who went missing on New Year's Day 2002 from the seaside town of Hamble, in Hampshire. He had spent the evening with friends fishing off the quay, something he did regularly. When he failed to return home, his parents discovered that his friends had last seen him heading to the quayside to collect his fishing gear. His fishing gear was found where he had left it, but Daniel had disappeared. He was described by his parents as a mature and responsible boy whose disappearance was completely out of character. On the surface, it seems Daniel was equally as worthy of attention as Milly Dowler, but didn't get it because of his gender.

Christine and Peter Boxall know this all too well. Their son, Lee, was 15 when he went missing on the way to a football match in south London in September 1988. He was one of the first cases to be taken up by the Missing Persons Bureau, as it was then. There have been no sightings in 14 years, despite numerous local appeals. His father said: 'I often think if it had been our daughter it may well have been very different. Even today, boys of 15 rarely get publicity because boys can look after themselves, can't they?'

There are certain rules in the missing persons game. Don't be a boy, don't be working class, don't be black. As for persistent runaways, children in care or teenagers with drug problems_ forget it. Milly Dowler was the perfect missing person: a beaming photogenic angel from a comfortable, middle-class home.

Mary Evans, professor of women's studies at the University of Kent, says there has been a shift in attitudes towards missing persons that mirrors shifts in attitudes to the sexuality of teenage girls. 'These girls are part of a now highly sexualised culture and the fascination we have with these cases is a reaction to our collective guilt about this phenomenon. The police and the families are literally looking for the missing person, but the social response is more complicated and tied up with our looking for the lost innocence that these cases represent.'

Evans also agrees that we have a fixed idea about missing persons cases and if the facts don't fit, the case is generally ignored. 'The stories we like to tell are about the abduction of a nice white middle-class girl by an older man. This is a fairly conventional set-up and when the narrative strays we become suspicious and find the story difficult to tell.'

When Ruth Wilson, a 16-year-old middle-class schoolgirl, left her home in the tiny village of Betchworth, near Dorking, for the last time in November 1995, there was nothing like the media frenzy that greeted Milly's disappearance. And there were striking parallels between the two cases. Ruth Wilson was no working-class serial runaway. Like the Dowlers, the Wilson family was stable and middle class - both parents are teachers. Until tragedy struck, both families had two daughters who were very close: Jenny Wilson was 13 when her sister went missing. Ruth, like Milly, was a popular and studious girl. She had passed her GCSEs and had just entered the sixth form, where she was already doing well, according to teachers.

The circumstances of Ruth Wilson's disappearance are deeply mysterious and perhaps just too odd to comfortably fit the sort of narrative that Professor Evans has identified. The events of Monday 27 November 1995 read like the opening pages of an Ian McEwan novel. It had been an ordinary weekend for Ruth. She had a Saturday job in a music shop in Dorking and went out for a meal with William, an ex-boyfriend who had become her best friend. On the Sunday, she went to hand-bell practice at the local church and then on to a youth club in Dorking, before going back to William's for supper. His mother had given her some of her old clothes and when she came home that evening she and her sister tried them on and then raided their own mother's wardrobe. The Wilson family remember Ruth being relaxed, laughing at the funny old-fashioned clothes.

On the Monday morning, her parents left for work early - Ian was preparing for an Ofsted inspection as head of science at the secondary school where he taught, and Karen, who was deputy head of a local primary at the time, also had a lot of preparation to do. Ian remembers being in a hurry and having pushed past Ruth, who was listening to her Walkman. 'I remember being annoyed with her,' said Ian. 'I said something like, "Out of my way. I'm in a hurry." I'll always regret that those were the last words I ever said to her.' The two sisters were used to catching the bus together to school, but at the last minute Ruth told her sister that she was not coming. 'I wasn't entirely surprised because she was in the sixth form and she didn't always come in for the whole day,' she said. 'I thought it was a bit strange that she left it to the last minute to tell me, but that was all.'

But Ruth didn't turn up at school at all that day and when her parents arrived home in the evening they began to worry. 'At first we thought she must have been babysitting and forgotten to tell us, or that we had forgotten to write it on the calendar. But as the evening went on we realised something was wrong.'

During the hours that followed, a bizarre story emerged. Shortly after Jenny left for school, Ruth's friend William had called for her in his car, but she declined the lift and told him she would be along later. Instead she called a taxi company in the next village and asked to be taken to the library in Dorking, where she spent several hours. At some point during the day she went to buy a bouquet of flowers for Karen, but left strict instructions that they were not to be delivered until Wednesday. Around 4pm that afternoon, she called another taxi from Dorking station and asked to be taken to Box Hill, a local beauty spot. Ruth asked to be left by a bridleway a short way from a pub. It had been a foul day and the light was already failing. It was around 4.15pm when the taxi driver looked in his mirror: the last positive sighting of Ruth in seven years. 'What was odd was that she just stood there. The taxi driver said that people almost always move away when you drop them off. He knew it wasn't quite right with hindsight, leaving a 16-year-old in the middle of nowhere,' said Ian.

Later, they discovered from school friends that Ruth often went to Box Hill after school before coming home. Was it a meeting place with a secret boyfriend or just a special place to think?

They also found out that she was worried about her performance at school and had hidden her latest school report from them that weekend.

In the book-lined lounge of their impeccable 17th-century cottage in Betchworth, Ian and Karen Wilson are still mystified by the disappearance of their studious and well-behaved daughter. 'We know the longer it goes on, the harder it would be for Ruth to come home. But she would be showered with love and kisses if she walked through the door today. It is not her fault.'

'Seven years ago it was completely different,' said Karen. 'Most police forces didn't treat cases like this seriously and people like us had to do our own publicity. Surrey police were one of the most positive forces. They came out that very night with sniffer dogs and helicopters with heat-seeking equipment. But the phenomenon of missing youngsters wasn't a big feature of life back then.' The Wilsons were shocked by the lack of a national strategy for children who disappeared or ran away. Missing persons were not automatically put on the Police National Computer and there was very little liaison between forces.

The refusal of the Wilsons to make themselves the centre of the story has certainly contributed to the lower profile of the case - later on they refused to appear on a game show where the audience would have been given the chance to vote for the next course of action taken by the family in the search for their daughter. But there is no doubt that the media have become much more fixated on these cases in the seven years since Ruth disappeared, and the police have also become more proactive and sophisticated in their approach to missing persons, including their use of parents to head up appeals. Ruth Wilson disappeared long before the missing persons culture had begun to feed our national paranoia. It seems inconceivable that the family would have been permitted to lie low if their daughter had gone missing today.

Craig Denham, the Detective Chief Superintendent in charge of the Milly Dowler case said Surrey police have learnt a lot since Ruth Wilson went missing - especially in their methods of dealing with the media. 'Within days of Milly's disappearance we had the three elements of our command strategy in place, made up of the investigation, the search and a media strategy,' he says.

Denham realised the scale of media interest was unprecedented for a missing person. 'The sheer unexplainable nature of it: for a girl to disappear off a suburban street struck a chord with the public. She came from a good family right in the middle of suburbia. These things happen in cities, but it was very unusual for them to happen in the suburbs.'

Since the Wilson case, Surrey has developed a sophisticated risk-assessment procedure for missing persons, to gauge their vulnerability. This looks at their age, and their history of self-harm, drug use or abuse within the family. In the case of persistent runaways it also looks at the length of time they run away for and patterns of behaviour relating to where they go when they run away.

'It is complicated. A young girl who has never run away before and takes no clothes with her is obviously at risk. But there are dangers of working with check lists. A streetwise young boy in care who has run away a hundred times and always returned may be equally at risk.'

'We had wonderful publicity with Milly,' said Mary Asprey, co-founder of the National Missing Persons Helpline (NMPH). 'People cannot imagine now what it was like when we started 12 years ago. There was nothing.' The charity she set up with her friend, Janet Newman, is now part of the fabric of British life. They were inspired by the work of Diana Lamplugh, who set up a trust to raise awareness of dangers to women when her daughter, the estate agent Suzy Lamplugh, went missing in 1986. Thanks to them, missing people are now part of the nation's conscience. Their photos stare out from milk cartons, newspaper adverts and poster-sized images on the backs of lorries. In their latest coup, the charity was chosen by Celebrity Big Brother to receive money from the show in the run-up to Christmas - a key period for disappearances.

Home Office figures show that around 210,000 people go missing each year, with the majority found within 72 hours. Volunteers on the helpline now receive around 100,000 calls a year and the charity resolves around 70 per cent of cases. It is concerned with missing persons of all ages, but clearly one of the most vulnerable groups is children. Research carried out for NMPH shows that 100,000 under-18s run away and, of that number, 77,000 are under-16s running away for the first time. The fact that all the cases mentioned above are aged between 14 and 16 is no coincidence - adolescents making the difficult transition into adulthood are by far the most likely runaways. And girls are twice as likely to run away than boys.

The people at NMPH can produce terrifying figures about the crucial importance of finding children quickly when they run away. Their research shows that children who have been away for a week or more have a 44 per cent chance of being physically hurt and 67 per cent who stayed with someone they had just met were hurt. The age-old warning of not talking to strangers seems to be borne out by these figures. But the numbers of child abductions remains very low, although public panic about the danger has hugely increased. In the past three years, the figure has been between 550 and 580 a year, most of which are abductions by members of the immediate family involved in custody battles.

In raising awareness of the issue, the NMPH must shoulder some responsibility for the panic. But Asprey and Newman believe it may be the price we have to pay for vigilance. They are now far more concerned with the issue of the thousands of runaways who never get the publicity that Milly Dowler enjoyed. 'It is unkind to blame the public. The public take an interest because the press take an interest, and we are glad they do. When The Sun and The Mirror put in our ads we are very grateful to the editors,' said Asprey. 'But it is true that when the child is black or the mother is a single mum or the family is not articulate then there is less interest.'

Of the 210,000 reports a year, the helpline estimates that around half come from children within the care system, and resources from the Department of Health have now been released to help the NMPH look into the problem. The Missing from Care project is led by former police officer Dave Flanagan, who said the problems raised by the Ruth Wilson case in Surrey seven years ago were still prevalent in the care system. 'There is a big problem here: there is no national database, no common reporting procedure and no common risk assessment.' He said it was difficult even to assess the scale of the problem because different authorities had different criteria for judging whether a child had gone missing. Persistent runaways are often ignored altogether - in one case quoted by Flanagan, a child had run away 130 times. 'It's difficult to know what to do in a case like that. In some cases publicity can make them more vulnerable and less likely to come back,' he said.

Sarah Benford is just such a case. The teenager went missing on 6 April 2000, just after her 14th birthday. She had been living in a children's home in Northampton, but kept in regular touch with her mother, Vicki, who still lived in her home town of Kettering, 50 miles away. Sarah had been taken into care because her mother was worried about the drug addicts and petty criminals she had begun to associate with in Kettering. 'They were sending her out to steal things and the police would just bring her back to me again and again,' said Vicki. 'She would often just go missing, but only ever for one or two days at a time and then resurface.' On the day she went missing, Sarah had come to see her mother at work to tell her she was in trouble. 'She always drank, but she told me she had started taking heroin and she was totally out of it. She told me she didn't want to go back to the children's home - and that was the last I ever saw of her.'

Vicki Benford's circumstances couldn't be more different from the Home Counties comfort of the Dowlers and the Wilsons. She lives in a terraced house in one of Kettering's red-brick streets and spent much of the two-and-a half years after Sarah disappeared waiting in the house for her to come home, drinking herself into oblivion or searching Kettering's parks where Sarah used to hang out. She has ended up in fights in pubs when people speak disrespectfully of her missing daughter. When Sarah disappeared, Vicki's life fell apart - her loss is no less real than any middle-class parent and the guilt is probably worse. In the past few months, Vicki has gone back to work and is trying to rebuild her life for her two younger children, Anya, 11, and Josh, 3, whose father, Gavin, was Sarah's stepdad.

She now thinks Sarah is dead, probably from an overdose, and is frustrated that the police believe Kettering's small community of drug addicts probably know more about her disappearance than they are saying.

It is a common refrain from families of missing children who have become involved in crime or drugs that the police don't fully investigate the disappearance of their loved ones. Deirdre Fenech, whose 16-year-old daughter went missing on 23 May 1998, is still angry about the way she was treated. She had moved to Crawley in Surrey to get away from the notorious North Peckham estate in south London where neighbours had begun to tell her that Carmel had been spotted at local crack houses. But Carmel drifted back into her old life and eventually disappeared after getting involved with a well-known south London drug dealer in his thirties. On the day she went missing, she had been living at home in Crawley, recovering from a brutal beating at the hands of her dealer-boyfriend. She had told friends she was three months pregnant and was returning to London to tell him.

Like Vicki, Deirdre believes the reason for her daughter's disappearance lies within the drugs underworld into which she had drifted. The dealer Carmel was involved with was sent to prison for 12 months in July and the police have said that they hope to get intelligence about him from dealers who have taken over his patch. Deirdre Fenech is still bitter about the lack of publicity her daughter's disappearance attracted. 'People look at us like we're scum from Peckham, because we don't live in a £200,000 house in Surrey, because our children had problems. It is terribly wrong, because we love our children, too.'

The conventional wisdom states that families such as Vicki's do not get publicity when their children go missing because they are not articulate. But a letter from Anya found in the room she shared with Sarah expressed the terrible loss felt by the families of missing persons better than anyone else I spoke to:

'To Sarah. Please come home. I miss you so much. I miss night-times when you used to call to me in your room and say I will read you a story if you tell Dad I want a drink. I miss your face and miss your smile. I just miss you and so does Josh and Mum and Gav. Please, please, please come home and try to get off those drugs. Lots and lots of love, Anya.

PS This boy is being horrible to me . He is horrible.'

· National Missing Persons Helpline: 0500 700 700

Last edited by Antoinette on Wed 31 Mar - 15:46; edited 2 times in total

After Reading this article I now realise it is to do with class when any child goes missing. God forbid if any other kids go missing I hope their parents are upper class & then their kids will get the publicity. If your poor you may as well forget about your child's face being kept in the public eye as you havnt a hope

yes it is obvious how the mccs are treated................you can imagine...and it has been said many times....what would have happened if they had been a single parent....or working class..they would have been ..charged ..with neglect at least....and the dna...would have stood imo

xtina wrote:yes it is obvious how the mccs are treated................you can imagine...and it has been said many times....what would have happened if they had been a single parent....or working class..they would have been ..charged ..with neglect at least....and the dna...would have stood imo

xtina kids are taken into care here in australia when they are left in the car ( if they suvive that is!!!) which is really good!!! but the mcanns get off scot free it is sickerning!!

The same thing exactly happens over here. When Natalie Holloway went missing in Aruba (white, rich, pretty) there was a media storm to end all media storms, and this is a country where media rules.

Yet when a 15 year old Hispanic girl went missing from near the Texas town we lived in, at the same time as Natalie, she only warranted just 3 inches of text in a local newspaper. She wasn't rich, she wasn't white, she obviously wasn't pretty enough for the national media, although to her parents she was the most beautiful girl in the world.

Sickening.

As George Orwell said, "Everyone is equal, but some are more equal than others".

Those McCanns KNEW that they would hit the headline bingo prize with Maddie, that's why they started their campaign to get all the newspapers and tv stations involved asap, they KNEW that she cute, pretty as a picture, appealing, with a family of picture perfect parents and siblings (in their eyes). They were media savvy enough to realise the impact their family would have, and traded on it like it has never been done before, to shore up their abduction lie. I think Rachel Oldfield was their mentor in this. God damn their souls.

Minsky wrote:What about the children that go missing from the poor black tribes in Africa? They have no hope of ever finding their children. So I suppose it is to do with money. Isn't everything? Sadly.

we have children here still missing daniel is still mssing since 1993 and his mum and dad very occasionally are in the media but they are realistic and know he is dead also azaria chamberlian vanished and her body was never found theres still aussies who think her mum did it

Minsky wrote:What about the children that go missing from the poor black tribes in Africa? They have no hope of ever finding their children. So I suppose it is to do with money. Isn't everything? Sadly.

we have children here still missing daniel is still mssing since 1993 and his mum and dad very occasionally are in the media but they are realistic and know he is dead also azaria chamberlian vanished and her body was never found theres still aussies who think her mum did it

Wether these kids are dead or alive their families need closure and until they are found the families cannot get this. All kids should be given as much publicity as possible as I'm my eyes no missing child is more important than another.

Minsky wrote:What about the children that go missing from the poor black tribes in Africa? They have no hope of ever finding their children. So I suppose it is to do with money. Isn't everything? Sadly.

we have children here still missing daniel is still mssing since 1993 and his mum and dad very occasionally are in the media but they are realistic and know he is dead also azaria chamberlian vanished and her body was never found theres still aussies who think her mum did it

Wether these kids are dead or alive their families need closure and until they are found the families cannot get this. All kids should be given as much publicity as possible as I'm my eyes no missing child is more important than another.

i agree!! azaria chamberlian was 9 weeks old when she vanished from ayers rock australia is still divided about it i was only 1 when she vanished soa baby myself but i have followed it most of my life!!! i have lindys book also the azaria case and the maddie case are very similer in alot of ways. i really feel for daniels parents they are to this day still devastated!!!

most who think it is to horrific......to think the mccs could have done anything to maddie.....know there is something not right.it is so wrong that the abduction is the only theory over here...yet not one bit of evidence to back it up.....yet so much on the fact the mccs are involved imo

Class does seem to play a part in the amount of publicity given to missing children and this article highlights it well. I had never heard of Hannah Williams before today, but remember the Milly Dowler case very well, partly because a school friend of mine lives in Walton-On-Thames.However, in some ways it is understandable that the police are less concerned when a child, who has gone missing before and returned home unharmed disappears, than when a girl like Milly, with no history of running away, goes missing. I suppose they must hope that the child has just run away again and will come back eventually.Another example of the police and medias' attitude changing according to the class of the victims was in the Peter Sutcliffe case. People really started to take an interest in the catching the perpetrator when it became obvious that 'respectable' women were at risk and not just prostitutes. Even the judge made a very telling remark about the tragedy of the fact that 'innocent' women had also been killed. There was an implication in his words, that protitutes were somehow less worthy of sympathy than students or building society clerks...terrible words.

I also remember a documentary back in the early 80s (maybe 1981), that showed a fly on the wall look at the Police, and it showed them "interrogating" a rape victim. I can't remember all the details, but they were treating her like rubbish, because she wasn't an innocent "good girl", and accusing her of making the whole thing up, but mostly I remember their complete disdain of her. Same thing again, isn't it?

The problem with having a Missing child is there is no real support provided for the parents. Actually there is not adequate support provided for missing adults even.

Unfortunately parents are left to rely on charitable organisations which can only provide help with publicity dependant on funds coming in from donations and work by volunteers. You could also include exploited children who rely on the same funding from the same charities.

I think the difference of how people are treated from different social circumstances is evident when the media are asked to help. The media are only driven by one thing and that is sales. Will it be a story that generates sales? The answer will bias whether the missing or exploited child is news worthy.

The other notable difference, I think, comes from funding independently beyong the support from various groups. For this a poor family will have to rely on what they can afford.

fedrules wrote:Class does seem to play a part in the amount of publicity given to missing children and this article highlights it well. I had never heard of Hannah Williams before today, but remember the Milly Dowler case very well, partly because a school friend of mine lives in Walton-On-Thames.However, in some ways it is understandable that the police are less concerned when a child, who has gone missing before and returned home unharmed disappears, than when a girl like Milly, with no history of running away, goes missing. I suppose they must hope that the child has just run away again and will come back eventually.Another example of the police and medias' attitude changing according to the class of the victims was in the Peter Sutcliffe case. People really started to take an interest in the catching the perpetrator when it became obvious that 'respectable' women were at risk and not just prostitutes. Even the judge made a very telling remark about the tragedy of the fact that 'innocent' women had also been killed. There was an implication in his words, that protitutes were somehow less worthy of sympathy than students or building society clerks...terrible words.

Yes fedrules, you put it very well. It is a shocking indictment of society that people are treated in different ways purely on the basis of class prejudice. Will things ever change? IMO the McCann affair illustrates quite dramatically that no, things will not change. The blind faith of people of a certain class in the McCanns renders them blind to the injustice and the need for change.

The McCanns have made sure that Madeleine will never be found, deceased or alive for that matter. They do seem to be "protected" and that is why they are so much on the public mind so to speak. No, the Mcs are not ordinary struggling people, live in a council house, have a beat up car. These people have a good car, nice house, plenty of cash and friends with huge question marks above their heads.

lynn wrote:The McCanns have made sure that Madeleine will never be found, deceased or alive for that matter. They do seem to be "protected" and that is why they are so much on the public mind so to speak. No, the Mcs are not ordinary struggling people, live in a council house, have a beat up car. These people have a good car, nice house, plenty of cash and friends with huge question marks above their heads.

What has having a good car,nice house, plenty of cash got to do with the pricve of gulit?

Yes they are not ordinary people. They have made careers of saving peoples lives. From whatever background their patients come from.

lynn wrote:The McCanns have made sure that Madeleine will never be found, deceased or alive for that matter. They do seem to be "protected" and that is why they are so much on the public mind so to speak. No, the Mcs are not ordinary struggling people, live in a council house, have a beat up car. These people have a good car, nice house, plenty of cash and friends with huge question marks above their heads.

What has having a good car,nice house, plenty of cash got to do with the pricve of gulit?

Yes they are not ordinary people. They have made careers of saving peoples lives. From whatever background their patients come from.

They certainly aren't ordinary people. At least where I come from. Here, ordinary people people don't abandon their kids to go eat, drink and have fun with their friends. Here, ordinary people take care of their children. And lets face it, that's not something out of the ordinary because it is ordinary for parents to care for their children at all times.

For which they are well paid. That does not make them extraordinary. Mr Grouse used to be a volunteer lifeboat man, and he saved peoples lives for free and in his own time, at the expense of his own family. That's extraordinary.